Conscience
by Haiza Tyri
Summary: A series of drabbles exploring Sherlock's conscience and his relationships, from Mycroft's point of view. Sequel to "Archenemy" and "Not Your Housekeeper."
1. Magnetism

**Author's note: This is the third in a series exploring the unwritten years of interactions between various "Sherlock" characters, mainly between Mycroft and Sherlock. The first is "Archenemy" (http:/www . fanfiction . net/s/6459881/1/Archenemy), and the second is "Not Your Housekeeper" (http:/www . fanfiction . net/s/6484644/1/Not_Your_Housekeeper).**

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_Magnetism_

Mycroft admitted to himself once again that he had been wrong. Sherlock did have an odd genius for winning loyalty. It wasn't like Mycroft's talent. He had fostered his natural ability, developed it carefully, saw to it that he attracted the people he needed. Sherlock's genius was all unconscious and haphazard, hidden behind his penchant for antagonising people. How else did you explain Lestrade, the housekeeper, the restaurant owner, the girl at the morgue, the pickpocket, the homeless network, that Stamford fellow, and now this Dr. John Watson? Some people just stuck to him, like metal filings to a magnet.


	2. Welcome

_Welcome_

It was only when he began sharing a flat with John Watson that Sherlock allowed Mycroft to step into his home. Of course it was only to tell him that, no, he wouldn't help him with the Bruce-Partingon Plans, but when irritation passed, Mycroft was not fooled. Something had changed for Sherlock. Something had calmed or mellowed, just slightly, that core he kept tightly locked away, that barrier he still held against his brother, even after all these years. In the nine years since his return from America, it was the first time he had let Mycroft in his house.


	3. Oversight

_Oversight_

It was amusing to watch from afar, keeping tabs on his brother and his brother's friend as they raced all over London, unaware of (or ignoring) his benevolent oversight. His brother chose to go to so many strange places: Tower 42, the Southbank Skatepark, an insignificant Chinese circus (of course Mycroft knew who they really were), and wherever he went, John Watson tagged along. Sherlock had often had assistants, but never one who followed him so willingly. When would this military doctor get fed up with him and leave him behind or turn into an antagonist like all the others?


	4. Danger

_Danger_

Sherlock kept putting himself into ridiculous positions where he would be in danger. Sometimes Mycroft wondered if it was on purpose, if the danger stood in for the cocaine he hadn't touched in years. He wanted to intervene, as he had before. But Mycroft had learned to stay out of it. Too many times he had moved in to make things come out right, and never, ever had that been the right response. It had only driven his brother away. Now Sherlock could get into all the trouble he wanted. After all, he always seemed to get out of it.


	5. Protection

_Protection_

But it was still difficult to simply trust Sherlock's judgment. Take the affair of the cabbie. Someone had had to shoot the man to keep him from killing Sherlock without the slightest force. A sharpshooter, a military man, accustomed to danger, accustomed to protecting people. Even Lestrade should have been able to work that one out. Sherlock still needed someone to protect him, not from everyone who might want to kill him but from himself, from his cold-bloodedness and his need for stimulation. Could it be that that someone might be his friend John Watson and not his older brother?


	6. Archenemy

_Archenemy_

He remembered watching Dr. Watson limp away after that first meeting. His lips curved, remembering. Archenemy. He'd wanted to see how the man would respond to the idea that Sherlock was the sort who made so many enemies he had to have an archenemy. That was, after all, still how Sherlock saw him. The ultimate enemy. And yet the kind of enemy one grudgingly respected, equal and opposite.

And he'd wanted to see what side Watson would choose. He had no reason to be loyal to Sherlock, every reason to ally himself with a man as powerful as Sherlock's archenemy.


	7. Honourable

_Honourable _

It had worked perfectly at university. It should have worked with John Watson. Poor, ex-military man, in bad health, pension barely covering his living expenses. After all he had given his country, what was his country giving back to him? Sherlock Holmes for a flatmate, that's what. Logically he should have been glad for the money, like Sherlock's roommates at school. It couldn't be some idea about honour, surely. No one worried about honour these days. Mycroft should know. But Mycroft had never met a man like John Watson and found himself shamed by the memory of his steady gaze.


	8. Suspicions

_Suspicions_

The moment John Watson appeared on the scene, Mycroft had been suspicious. Who was this military man? How had he met Sherlock? Why would he want to share an expensive flat with him? Why was his limp psychosomatic? Was his goal just a flat-share, or did he have some ulterior motive? Was it anything to do with getting near one of the most powerful and invisible men in the government through his increasingly well-known brother? Was it anything to do with Sherlock's activities? A meeting with the man was in order. Then Mycroft would know everything he needed to know.


	9. Helping

_Helping_

Mycroft knew Sherlock was having money and housing problems before his improbable scheme of flat sharing. Sherlock had romantic notions about his profession, this consulting-detective thing, about how he was the only one who could do it properly, about how the criminal classes feared him and whispered about him in secret, but it certainly did not pay well, at least not well enough to keep the great consulting detective in expensive chemistry equipment and well-tailored coats. He wouldn't let Mycroft help, of course, and Mycroft wouldn't dream of trying._ No more "helping," Mycroft._ He'd learned his lesson ten years ago.


	10. Assistants

_Assistants _

Before John Watson, there had been a series of "assistants," usually supplied by Lestrade, mostly because Sherlock needed an audience but also because his thought processes worked better when they bounced off others' unintelligent ideas. (Mycroft still didn't understand that.) Some of them lasted longer than others. Sally Donovan lasted all of three hours. Neither Lestrade nor Mycroft ever found out what Sherlock did to her during that simple little murder investigation that turned her from a vaguely admiring assistant to a pathologically resentful antagonist whose favorite epithet was "Freak," but it was certain Sherlock himself didn't understand or care.


	11. Freak

_Freak_

Sherlock's skin had gotten thicker in the last ten years or so. He heard Donovan calling him "Freak" every time she saw him without batting an eye. Used to be there was a definite eyelid quiver at a name like that. Mycroft could remember seeing something inside his brother flinch at every name-calling, every jeer. Then Sherlock would close up and stare at his opponent with that look that said he found them oh so inconsequential and boring, and then he would purposefully become odder, more alien, more separate from the masses. Now he merely seemed to find it _amusing._


	12. Humanity

_Humanity_

Mycroft confessed (to himself and himself alone) that Sherlock's work perplexed and astonished him. Ever since he returned from America in 2001, he'd set himself on an unrelenting study of people, their work, their habitations, their habits, their technology, their diseases, their plots, their accomplishments. He walked London's streets and knew them better than any cabbie. He accumulated assistants among bankers and criminals and artists and beggars. He had useful contacts in every hospital and mortuary in the city. He had people who owed him something everywhere he needed them.

He understood everything about people except what made them human.


	13. Assistance

_Assistance_

That first case they actually worked on together had been in 2008. It was after that that Sherlock called at Mycroft's club, for the first time, asked to see his brother, for the first time. Before that their meetings had mostly been by "accident." Coincidences that fooled neither of them.

Sherlock told Mycroft that he was leaving the next morning for Florida. An urgent case, he said. Someone was calling his evidence from a previous case into question, he said. Mycroft read between the lines and forced on him the letter of recommendation he wanted and would not ask for.


	14. Help

_Help_

"I need your help." He'd never said that, not ever. Not to anyone. Not to his brother, not to their mother, not to their father, not to tutors, not to assistants, not to contacts. Such an admission had never come from his lips nor his typing fingers. It required a herculean effort to overcome his pride and resentment, when it was easier to let the barrier between them remain than to be the one to loosen its foundations. Who had laid the foundations? Who had built the barrier? By now it was impossible to remember.

"Sherlock, I need your help."


	15. Accidents

_Accidents_

"Accidental" meetings. Mycroft showing up to consult with Lestrade while Sherlock was there. Sherlock coming to do "research" at the private clinic while Mycroft was there, forcing Mycroft to admit that his doctor was putting him on an enforced diet.

Mycroft wasn't sure what Sherlock's motives were. Was he trying to show his brother that he was getting along perfectly well without his interference? Or was he, in some way, trying to say he was sorry for what he'd said, back then? Mycroft doubted it. As far as he knew, Sherlock had never been sorry for anything in his life.


	16. News

_News_

For the first two years after he returned from America, Sherlock ignored the fact that he had a brother in the world, in the same city he chose to live in. Mycroft had to get most of his news from Lestrade, though he had no shortage of other ways to keep track of his brother. Lestrade refused to try to get Sherlock to talk about Mycroft, but he told Mycroft all he wanted about the quality of Sherlock's work, his continued arrogance, and his absolute blindness to the way he put people's backs up. Sherlock never once asked about Mycroft.


	17. Infuriating

_Infuriating_

After Sherlock's successes in the United States, and his renewed personal stability, Lestrade had given him work again. He was practically forced to, he told Mycroft, when he came up against a tricky case he couldn't decipher and suddenly found Sherlock standing at his side, infuriatingly elegant, staring innocently at the scene. He hadn't known Sherlock was back.

"Oi! What're you doing here?" Lestrade asked rudely.

"Nothing at all, other than observing your officers' incompetence," Sherlock answered equally rudely.

After a moment, Lestrade said, "Well, what do you think?"

Sherlock solved the whole case for him in ten minutes even.


	18. Return

_Return_

Mycroft knew the moment Sherlock set foot back in England, after a year and a half. He waited, expectantly. No matter what had happened between them before, Sherlock always come back around, always let him back in. After all, surely a year and a half was enough time in which to learn to forgive your brother for helping you with your cocaine addiction? But Sherlock never came.

Instead, he went to Oxford. Oxford? Why on earth should he choose to go to Oxford?

Mycroft knew. Sherlock was only thumbing his nose at him. Or, maybe, pretending he had never existed.


	19. Blank

_Blank_

For ten years now, since the day Sherlock disappeared from England, Mycroft had been pondering what really made Sherlock what he was, whatever that was. Not really a true sociopath, nor actually autistic, though he tried to act like both, and yet so unconscious, so blank to normal notions of right and wrong, health and pathology, _balance._ Was Mycroft and his rash, angry comment way back in 1984 really to blame? Was Dad's death to blame? Was Mummy's illness to blame? Was their shared genius to blame? He thought back to all the ways Sherlock's strange _blankness_ had shown up.


	20. Exhibit

**Author's note: I'm sorry it's been a while since I've updated this. I've been busy writing other things...**

**Hopefully by now you've noticed that the timeline in this story is moving backward.**

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_Exhibit_

Cambridge. Late 1994. One of Mycroft's contacts in Sherlock's college told him about Sherlock's increasing popularity, how people found him fascinating, useful, and alien (like an exhibit at a fair, she said). They would listen to him tell all about them, the way you would watch a magician at a show—but when he started telling their secrets, they would get angry, and he would never quite understand why. Or maybe he simply didn't care, she said, hesitantly, not sure what Mycroft would say to that. Mycroft only nodded. He knew Sherlock didn't care if he hurt or antagonized people.


	21. Unproductive

_Unproductive_

Sherlock always went his own way without any reference to his effect on others. Of course, that was fairly normal for a teenager, but even the most selfish teen cared what his friends thought of him. Sherlock didn't seem to care that he didn't have friends. He didn't seem to notice or care that his way of speaking made people feel foolish, that his swift judgments of others' intelligence made them angry, and that making others feel foolish and angry was not productive. So observant in most areas, he was completely blind in another and didn't seem to notice it.


	22. Congenital

_Congenital_

Had Sherlock ever paid attention to how other people felt? That was the real question, the one that would answer whether his "condition" was congenital or self-created. As a child he'd been quick-tempered but also frustratingly unresponsive when Mycroft most wanted his response. "Mummy wants you to stop…" (whatever destructive but fascinating activity he was currently engaging in) always met with a blank look, as if the fact that Mycroft wanted him to pay attention to what Mummy wanted simply did not compute. (The fact that Mycroft always ended up getting in trouble for yelling at him did not help.)


	23. Shakespeare

_Shakespeare_

He even asked him once, when he was annoyed with the way Sherlock's cold-blooded behaviour made the whole family look to the neighbours. "Don't you care, Sherlock? Don't you care that you may have ruined the Higgins' marriage when you blurted out your observations about Mr. Higgins? Don't you care that all the neighbourhood children either are afraid of you or feel they have to beat you up? Don't you care that Mummy is worried? Where's your _conscience?"_

Sherlock looked at him flatly. "'Conscience doth make cowards of us all.'"

It is a mistake to let twelve-year olds read Shakespeare.


	24. Alien

_Alien_

And then Mycroft remembered. The first time someone called Sherlock a freak. The way his face had flashed white, the way his wide, pale eyes had gone wider and paler but darkened at the same time, the way that old magnifying glass he used to like to use had trembled in his fingers. That hurt, that idea that his difference made him somehow less human, less acceptable. And then it made him angry, made him pull away and purposefully widen the gap between himself and all who would call him _freak_. Was that when he started retreating behind cool disdain?


	25. Outside

_Outside_

And then Mycroft remembered what he had always hoped never to remember. Their father, who died when Sherlock was seven, had always favoured him, Mycroft. Mycroft was his perfect child, he said, his perfect son. He never said so, but you could see in his eyes when he looked at Sherlock that his younger son was a cipher—worse, he was alien. Sherlock didn't fit into his view of the world, so he was quietly pushed outside it. Always _outside_, Sherlock had learned to hide behind a shell of "I don't care" long before the first child called him _freak._


	26. Perfect

_Perfect_

They never talked about Dad after he died. They could talk about Mummy after _she_ died—quarrel about her, about who had been better, who had been her favorite, who had unfair advantages (they each thought the other did), but Dad seemed to cease to exist after he died, as if he had never been. Mycroft knew Sherlock was too hurt about him to do anything but pretend he had never been in their lives. He was good at that, pretending someone didn't exist. Maybe that was the root of his resentment toward Mycroft. The older brother, Dad's perfect son.


	27. Sociopath

_Sociopath_

Mycroft knew then that if he hadn't made that _sociopath_ remark, a year later, driven by frustration at having to be Sherlock's surrogate parent, anger at Sherlock's behavior, grief he'd never been able to properly express—if he had never done that, Sherlock would have found something else. Some other way to keep out the world. Already absorbed in the world of his own mind, all he needed was the slightest impetus, the slightest excuse to shut out everything he didn't want to deal with. But his older brother should not have been the one to give it to him.


	28. Self Creation

_Self-Creation_

Self-created sociopathy was a good fit for Sherlock. If you couldn't feel certain emotions, you didn't have to respond to other's feelings and care that they had them. You didn't have to let them intrude on your equanimity. You could exist solely in the pristine world of the mind, pretend that the painful and mundane world of the body and emotions didn't exist. Eventually you could come to a place where they really did not exist, where instead of pretending you didn't feel, you truly didn't feel.

If you had once crafted yourself into a sociopath, could you undo it?


	29. Nag

_Nag_

Mycroft had always tried to be Sherlock's conscience. All through his childhood and youth, he was always reminding him, "Your actions have an effect on people." "If you make people hate you, you'll never be able to get them to do anything for you." "That's going to upset Mummy." "Why can't you just do things _this_ way?"

When had nagging and scolding ever worked? Had he ever succeeded in reforming Sherlock into what he thought he should be? There he was, Dad all over again, unwilling to accept him for what he was, trying to make him a little Mycroft.


	30. Condensed

_Condensed_

He'd hoped America would do for Sherlock what he obviously couldn't. That strange, expansive, cheerful country—would it expand his constricted brother? He'd spent the last sixteen years closing himself up into a taut little shell, all eyes, observing, and fingers, examining, and brain, deducting.

And he was right. Sherlock was different when he came back in 2001, less taut, less cold. Expanded. But it also condensed him, made him even more what he already was. That land of opportunity had taught him that the direction he had chosen for his life was the right one. Now he was single-minded.


	31. Meddle

_Meddle_

Though Mycroft had promised himself in the years since America not to meddle, at least overtly, he couldn't help himself. There was something in him that couldn't quite believe Sherlock could make it through his own life without ruining his own chances with his self-imposed blankness. Someday he was going to antagonise Lestrade past his ability to endure, again. Someday he was going to stick his inquisitive head where it didn't belong and find himself dead or arrested. If you wanted to stay out of prison, you _had_ to develop some kind of conscience! Could Mycroft bear not to meddle?


	32. Unforeseen

_Unforeseen_

But then there was something new, unforeseen. Mycroft was watching John Watson closely, when he never knew it. He might be the making of Sherlock, or make him worse. His admiration and need for the danger Sherlock offered could serve merely to encourage him and condense him all the more. At the same time, steadiness, courage, a quiet intelligence that worked differently from Sherlock's but intelligence nonetheless, a kind of virtue—even _honour—_those things could change Sherlock, with their steady, daily persistence. Which would it be? Which direction would John Watson lead Mycroft's brother?

Mycroft was watching him closely.


	33. Housekeeper

_Housekeeper_

John Watson did the things Sherlock wouldn't. He interacted with meddlesome family members. He answered texts. He saw to it that things got done, the everyday, unimportant, vital things. He dared to think that maybe it was important to find stolen, top-secret missile plans, even if it was a bothersome older brother who wanted them found. He saw the victims as human beings. He believed in people's better nature. He refused to believe in such grandiloquencies as archenemies but instead showed up the childish rivalry for what it was.

He was the housekeeper for Sherlock's soul. Melodramatic, perhaps, but true.


	34. Conscience

_Conscience_

John Watson was the conscience Sherlock had never had. Far more effective than whatever it was he had once had, before Mycroft showed him the way to kill it. Far more effective than Mycroft himself, who nagged and scolded and forced, who pushed and goaded and pressured and judged, who snuck around behind his back and thought some day he would be able to persuade or dominate him into being _normal._ John Watson accepted Sherlock's abnormalities and acted as the quiet influence, showing rather than insisting, _being_ rather than persuading. Mycroft could see it in Sherlock's eyes. He was expanding.


	35. Epilogue

_Epilogue: Chess_

Mycroft had always won at chess, but Sherlock had always won at Go. Mycroft used to think it ought to be the other way around, because chess, like Sherlock, was about piercing to the ultimate goal, of knocking over the king, while Go was about surrounding and dominating. But now he realized that it was right, because chess was essentially about humanity, and Go was essentially about black and white abstractions. Sherlock could reduce people to abstractions, while Mycroft dealt with what people really were inside.

Maybe someday Mycroft and Sherlock would play chess again. Maybe someday Sherlock would win.

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**Thus endeth "Conscience." **

**"Vulcan" (****http:/www . fanfiction . net/s/6560821/1/Vulcan)**** completes the series.  
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